E.O. Wilson
Consilience


p. 117--"Art is the means by which people of similar cognition reach out to others in order to transmit feeling. But how can we know for sure that art communicates in this way with accuracy, that people really, truly <i>feel</i> the same in the presence of art? We know it intuitively by the sheer weight of our cumulative responses through the many media of art. We know it by detailed verbal descriptions of emotion, by critical analyses, and in fact through data from all the vast, nuanced, and interlocking armamentaria of the humanities. That vital role in the sharing of culture is what the humanities are all about. Nevertheless, fundamental new information will come from science by studying the dynamic patterns of the sensory and brain systems during episodes when commonly shared feelings are evoked and experienced through art. [I'm down, but really, how on earth can he call this information "fundamental" when we've made it this far without it?!]

"But surely, skeptics will say, that it impossible. Scientific fact and art can never be translated one into the other. Such a response is indeed the conventional wisdom. But I believe it is wrong. The crucial link exists: The common property of science and art is the transmission of information, and in one sense the respective modes of transmission in science and art can be made logically equivalent." ["can be made" is a very telling+troubling turn of phrase!] 





***parsimony***
E.O. Wilson
Consilience
(1998)
p. 202--"Economic theory is not Ptolemaic, not so structurally defective that a revolution in conception is needed. The most advanced of the micro-to-macro models are on the right track. But the theorists have unnecessarily handicapped themselves by closing off their theory from serious biology and psychology, comprising principles drawn from close description, experiments, and statistical analysis. They have done so, I believe, in order to avoid entanglement in the formidable complexities of these foundation sciences. Their strategy has been to solve the micro-to-macro problem with the fewest possible assumptions at the micro level. In other words, they have carried parsimony too far. Economic theories also aim to create models of the widest possible application, often crafting abstractions so extreme as to represent little more than exercises in applied mathematics. That is generality carried too far. The result of such stringency is a body of theory that is internally consistent but little else. Although economics, in my opinion, is headed in the right direction and provides the wedge behind which social theory will wisely follow, it is still mostly irrelevant."



p. 54--"The cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its natural constituents. The very word, it is true, has a sterile and invasive ring, like scalpel or catheter. Critics of science sometimes portray reductionism as an obsessional disorder, declining toward a terminal stage one writer recently dubbed "reductive megalomania." That characterization is an actionable misdiagnosis. Practicing scientists, whose business is to make verifiable discoveries, view reductionism in an entirely different way: It is the search strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems. Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity. Reductionism is the way to understand it. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science."






E.O. Wilson
Consilience
(1998)

p. 83--"Consilience among the disciplines grows more smoothly from the top down as more links are laid in place, from the most specific of entities, such as the brain of Amaringo [the tribesman?], all the way to the most general, his atoms and molecules. But to establish consilience the other way, from general to more specific, is vastly more difficult. In short, it is far easier to analyze Amaringo than to synthesize him.

"The greatest obstacle to consilience by synthesis, the approach often loosely called holism, is the exponential increase in complexity encountered during the upward progress through levels of organization."




p. 184--"Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy was a strategy fashioned by the founders, most notably Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers. They aimed to isolate their nascent disciplines from the foundational sciences of biology and psychology, which at the inception of the social sciences were in any case too primitive to be of clear relevance. This stance was fruitful at first. It allowed scholars to search widely for patterns in cultural and social organization unencumbered by the patronage of the natural sciences, and to compose such laws of social action as the prima facie evidence demanded. But once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature."






p. 210--"Reflection leads us to two questions about the arts: where they come from, in both history and personal experience, and how their essential qualities of truth and beauty are to be described through ordinary language."

Who exactly is <i>led</i> so inexorably to these two questions? They strike me as completely unnecessary. As a result, I have been stuck with many questions about these questions. That is the nature of my inquiries.

Have I ever once wondered "where the arts come from?" I don't think I have. So who tf are all these people who DO wonder this, and wonder it with some intensity that it overtakes whatever common sense they might otherwise possess?

Have I ever once found myself in a terrible pickle vis-a-vis how I might "describe through ordinary language" art's "essential qualities of truth and beauty?" Barf! Why tf bother? Who bothers, and why? 

--"When of high quality, criticism can be as inspired and idiosyncratic as the work it addressed."

This is a true statement. The question, though, is whether criticism is <i>necessary</i>, and if so (though I think not), <i>why</i> it is necessary?









E.O. Wilson
Consilience
(1998)

p. 231--"The explanation for the rarity of great beauty may be (and I continue to speculate) the behavioral phenomenon known as the supernormal stimulus. Widespread among animal species, it is the preference during communication for signals that exaggerate the norms even if they rarely if ever occur in nature." 

e.g. male butterflies who can be more attracted to mechanical replicas "that have the biggest, brightest, and most rapidly moving wings" than to actual females

--"Males [of this species] appear to have evolved to prefer the strongest expression of certain stimuli they encounter, with no upper limit. The phenomenon is widespread in the animal kindgom."

Maybe this explains the "rarity of great beauty." But more importantly, it's a warning to all of us in the "animal kingdom" that we had better hang onto at least the vestiges of medieval asceticism, by way of which certain <i>upper limits</i> are fruitfully reimposed. Otherwise we'll end up eating and fucking plastic replicas, and thinking we like it.